Automobile Trip Bumpers

Elaborate people catchers designed for pedestrian safey

Feature Article from Hemmings Motor News

You always accepted that cars were dangerous. Part of what made Saab an oddball when they came to the U.S. in the 1950s was their standard safety belts, and while there had been a movement toward safer cars beginning in the 1930s, there were decades before that where it was barely even considered.
A few people have always been thinking about safety, however. Often this was the result of personal experience and they were, as a group, wide-eyed optimists, for no matter how innovative their designs, they always had integrated them into cars with no provisions for safety whatsoever.
Some were even thinking about pedestrian safety, too. In addition to their inherent braking weaknesses, Twenties and earlier cars posed their own, unique hazards to pedestrians: With grilles that often came up to the chest of a person on foot, if you were hit, you were going to be flung to the ground, then run over. This was, generally, fatal, and never mind the pedestrian's responsibility to watch out for cars: Something had to be done.
Around 1920, inventors started offering trip bumpers to solve the problem. There were, broadly, three kinds, but they did the same thing: Kept a pedestrian from going under a car by scooping them up and taking them along.
Trip bumpers came in two flavors, active and passive, and passive designs were actually the least common. On the Moore Combined Trip Bumper and Collision Screen (1923), "a person struck by an automobile is effectively tripped so that instead of being thrown forward and run over by the automobile he is caused to fall backward into and against the collision screen..." In other words, collected by a cowcatcher type basket carried a few inches off the ground, possibly leaving his ankles behind. Presumably, the driver didn't then stand on his brakes and launch poor Footless into the air.
In an automatic active like the Pohlig Fender (1919), counterweights softened the blow to the shin, and then reduced the bounce-off factor by giving way. It even reset automatically, so you didn't have to waste time while trying to gather your complete set of accident victims.
Our favorites are the manual active bumpers, like the McCloskey Combined (1923), shown. These had the resiliency of an automatic, but rather than sticking out in front of your car all the time, they were kept retracted until needed. In the McCloskey, you had three levers attached to your steering column. Upon imminent collision with a pedestrian, you pulled one to drop the bumper; another to lock it; then, later, after the gore had been hosed off, you could raise it back into position from the comfort of the cabin, ready to spear yet another unsuspecting victim. Issues of grabbing the correct of three identical levers in an emergency, and reaching around behind the wheel while ostensibly trying to avoid killing someone, were trivial. Besides, it had an anti-rattle device.
Trip bumpers were not notably successful in the marketplace.

This article originally appeared in the April, 2012 issue of Hemmings Motor News.